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North Korea Gains Some Breathing Room After Cancellation of Summit

Trump says talks with Pyongyang continue, but U.S. will likely have tougher time obtaining international support for further resolutions against regime

North Korea blew up its nuclear test site in front of foreign reporters Thursday, in a move it hailed as making a “positive contribution to building a nuclear-free world.”
Photo:
Yonhap News/Zuma Press

North Korea emerges from an abortive summit with President
Donald Trump
with its nuclear program intact and with more breathing room on sanctions, as the U.S. now has reduced leverage to extend its campaign of economic pressure.

After months of a gathering détente that helped the North repair relations with South Korea and China, the Pyongyang regime takes away considerable benefits—chief among them, interrupting a headlong rush toward greater military and economic pressure that jeopardized its survival. The U.S. walks away without a deal on denuclearization.

Mr. Trump’s cancellation of his planned meeting with North Korean leader
Kim Jong Un
prompted a relatively subdued response Friday from Pyongyang, which praised the president’s initial openness to meet and said it would be willing to sit down with the U.S. “at any time” to advance the “peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula and humankind.”

The measured reaction allayed some concerns about an imminent return to the rhetorical and military threats that defined the relationship between Washington and Pyongyang for much of 2017.

President Trump cancelled a planned summit meeting Thursday with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. WSJ's Gerald F. Seib looks at what might have prompted the change, whether it could be permanent, and how North Korea might react. Photos: Getty Images

Mr. Trump reiterated his pledge Thursday to continue applying maximum pressure on North Korea through sanctions. But he said Friday morning that dialogue with North Korea continued. “We are talking to them now,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “They very much want to do it. We’d like to do it,” he said about holding a summit.

Having called off the summit with the North Korean leader, the U.S. is now set to face a tougher time obtaining international support for further United Nations Security Council resolutions against the regime. In particular, Beijing and Moscow, which went along with sanctions last year, would likely resist subsequent attempts by Washington to impose more stringent measures, said
Mintaro Oba,
a former State Department official involved in North Korea policy.

“Trump canceling the summit is the worst thing he could’ve done for the maximum pressure campaign because it plays into the narrative that the U.S. is to blame for the setback in relations with North Korea,” Mr. Oba said. “China may feel emboldened to more actively say ‘no’ to new sanctions.”

Enforcing existing sanctions poses a challenge in the short run, too. Before Mr. Trump scrapped the summit meeting, which had been scheduled for June 12 in Singapore, he accused China in a tweet this week of relaxing its sanctions implementation, saying the frontier had become “much more porous” and urging China to be “strong & tight” on sanctions.

Beijing has said it enforces U.N. sanctions, and Chinese traders near the North Korean border say they haven’t seen signs of relaxed enforcement in recent weeks.

Meanwhile, North Korea made a series of moves throughout the course of the diplomatic détente that have garnered it goodwill and positive publicity on the international stage.

Last month, Mr. Kim met with South Korean President Moon Jae-in at the inter-Korean demilitarized zone and declared an end to war. Weeks later, he freed three U.S. citizens detained in the country. On Thursday, North Korea blew up its nuclear test site in front of foreign reporters, in a move it hailed as making a “positive contribution to building a nuclear-free world.” The North, though, had declared its nuclear program complete, and the test site was thought already damaged from the last explosion.

“It’s a tough situation that the U.S. is in,” said
Srinivasan Sitaraman,
associate professor of political science at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. “Those who don’t know anything about this are going to say, ‘Look, they blew up the test site, why torture them more?’”

President
Vladimir Putin
of Russia said Thursday that Mr. Kim “did everything he promised,” only for the U.S. to cancel the summit.

“Calling off the meeting, just as North Korea held a stage-managed partial demolition of its nuclear test site in the presence of international media, will strengthen Pyongyang’s claim, however spurious, to be acting in good faith,” said
Euan Graham,
director of the international security program at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney.

Seoul, which was blindsided and disappointed by Mr. Trump’s withdrawal, is unlikely to support a return to the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign, Mr. Graham added.

South Korea’s presidential national security adviser, Chung Eui-yong, said Friday that Seoul would try to enable direct communication between the leaders of the U.S. and North Korea.

Japanese Prime Minister
Shinzo Abe,
who has supported Mr. Trump’s tougher approach to Pyongyang, said Tokyo would “work with the international community to resolve the problems of North Korea’s missiles and nuclear weapons.”

The U.S. had approached the summit with the aim of persuading Pyongyang to relinquish its nuclear weapons in exchange for economic benefits. But as the date approached, and despite efforts by South Korea’s leader to keep the détente on track, the North made it increasingly clear that it wasn’t willing to trade away its nuclear arsenal.

Instead, some experts have said that Pyongyang wanted a meeting with Mr. Trump in which the primary topics would be arms control and the North’s status as a responsible nuclear state.

North Korea has long sought de facto recognition as a nuclear state, a prospect the U.S. has been unwilling to entertain. As such, the regime will likely consider the scrapping of the summit a temporary setback in its quest for recognition as a nuclear power, Mr. Sitaraman said.

Ultimately, the U.S. and North Korea could agree to meet, provided they are able to bridge the gap between them.

“It seems like both sides are preserving their flexibility to maybe get back to a summit,” Mr. Oba said.